Exploring the factors affecting travellers’ webrooming intention: a moderated-mediation analysis

Abstract

ABSTRACT Webrooming, the practice of researching online before buying at a physical store, is a growing trend. The study investigated how various socio-psychological aspects influence consumers’ intentions to webrooming from the perspective of tourism products. The research also analysed the mediating functions of hedonic motivation (HM) and utilitarian motivation (UM) amongst socio-psychological factors and webrooming intention (WI). Furthermore, the research examines how perceived risk of online purchase (PROP) can moderate the mediating impacts of HM and UM. The methodology integrates a conceptual framework to evaluate the influencing factors of search online and make a buy offline on WI along with the mediating and moderating factors. A SEM-based quantitative data analysis was carried out to assess the proposed hypotheses by analysing 654 collected responses. The outcomes specify that WI is notably affected by the perceived usefulness of online portal. The variables effects on WI are mediated by HM and UM. The perceived UM had a different mediating impact both high and low degrees of attitudes of PROP. The research will support tourism companies manage cross-channel customer behaviour. The research will benefit the literature on tourism marketing by investigating the new development of WI and switching the channel.